More about No. 1 Ladies' Wild Red Bush Tea

Wild Rooibos is not exactly tea and it's not like anything you've ever tried before - even if you are familiar with rooibos. The taste is incredible. Its deep, rich, berry flavours are incomparable to the bland, commercial crop stuffed in bags. (It is loose not because of snobbery or affectations but because we didn't want to grind it into dust just so it wouldn't tear a tea-bag.)

This is real bush-tea. Beyond organic and indigenous. Harvested on a wild mountainside on horse-back with machetes in the Cedarberg Mountains of South Africa to protect the delicate eco system, ensuring no damage is done to the fragile environment.

You can see pictures of the farm here and you can watch a little film Rare Tea Lady made for the Guardian.

This is no ordinary tea harvest. But then rooibos (Afrikaans for 'red bush') is no ordinary tea. Strictly speaking a legume, the needle-like leaves produce a deeply delicious caffeine-free drink. It has been used as a medicine to cure innumerable ills and drunk for pleasure for many thousands of years by the people of this area.

This is sustainable farming at its best.

Rather than being farmed as a mono-culture it is harvested wild where it grows naturally. Where this bush-tea grows wild leopards roam. We source it from a farmer who is also the local GP - Dr Strauss. He is an amazing man who is not just interested in saving people but the environment and the endangered Cape Leopard.

By leaving whole areas of the mountains uncultivated and un-grazed the delicate ecosystem survives intact. The plants in this arid region are unique and perfectly adapted. Growing in its natural habitat rooibos needs nothing to flourish unlike its cultivated counterparts. It needs no pesticides, no herbicides and no irrigation. For fertilizer, there are leopards. This is far beyond organic farming.

With many thanks to Alexander McCall Smith without whose stories we might never have known of the power of Bush Tea. And without whose kindness you would not find the story within the tin.

"There is no problem so great it cannot be solved by a cup of bush tea." Precious Ramotswe, the owner of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.